


cymbalina

by Beabaseball (beabaseball)



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Anxiety, Bruce Needs a Hug, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Roles, Internal Conflict, Intersex, Misgendering, Other, Past Selina Kyle/Bruce Wayne, Suicidal Thoughts, Trans Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-09-22
Packaged: 2020-10-19 21:36:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20664173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beabaseball/pseuds/Beabaseball
Summary: Their existence is not defined by suffering, and Bruce tries to keep this in mind, but it is sohardwhen it feels like suffering is all that makes up this world sometimes.It's hard to feel like one specific part of himselfisn'tabout suffering. But at the very least, perhaps he can remind himself that it is not the climax of his pain. If the sum is greater than its parts, after all, then the parts must simply be that.Parts.





	1. Chapter 1

He envies people whose given name was something like Jolene, or Jaquenline. If they’d shorten to Joe or Jack, and no one would be the wiser. No one would have to realize, or perhaps the name would be better respected if it was felt as a nickname. Perhaps the parents wouldn't feel rejected if the given name were incorporated into the chosen one.  


Bruce knows, of course, that not all parents feel the name change as a rejection. He knows not all names change. He knows some parents are accepting or even supportive. He knows that hoping for that is a gamble.  


He does not know what his parents would have felt. And he never will.  


Sometimes, when he thinks too long, he wonders about it. Decades may go by between those moments-- but he does wonder about it; piecing through his faint memories of them, of what they were like, and combining them with what Alfred has told him, and what the old news reports say.  


He still cannot guess what his parents would say, and so he has to proceed without them. Without their blessing, or curse, and... without even their indifference. He cannot ask them what other name they might've chosen to give him a starting point. He cannot bear to take his father's name on himself.  


…

He names himself after Lee Jun-fan. After Springsteen. After ‘ _ I want to believe as he does. I will never be on the wrong side again,’  _ and ‘ _ my hate will die with you.’ _

(Alfred had learned that, though Bruce would study quite diligently on his own, he would enjoy homework a bit more if there were a related film to complain about when it was done.

Gibson had gotten plenty wrong, history-wise, but Bruce had not been able to forget the Robert the heir-of-Scotland, who had betrayed a man to death, and cried out against his kingdoms in regret.)

It is not the first time Bruce has remade himself in the image of other men.  


\--

He does not speak if the voice changer has been damaged. The Justice League calls him paranoid for this, but Bruce cannot risk the few people he has who call him  _ him  _ when even Alfred switches back to  _ Miss Wayne  _ and  _ young lady  _ as soon as the mask comes off.  


Alfred believed the lie Bruce told himself when he first started. That Batman was just a misnomer to draw suspicion away from her. That no one would suspect a  _ woman _ when they were searching for a  _ man _ .  


...and three years in, clinging the mask over his face, half-delirious with toxin and Alfred too busy trying to dig a bullet out of his side and staunch the bleeding to notice, does Bruce admit to himself that they  _ are  _ looking for a man. They just wouldn't recognize him as one without the mask. And fuck. Fuck, if this is the bullet that takes him to his parents, he wishes that at least wherever they go when they die, he won't have to think about  _ this-- _

And ‘this’ is just… this.  


This body. This name. This  _ Miss Wayne, please lower your arm, _ and the hair that curls down to the base of his neck.  


He doesn't want to think about it anymore.  


\--

Robin is the first one who calls Bruce ‘he’ in the Batcave all the time, rather than just in a mask. He stops in the Manor, but… in the cave, it’s just Batman. And that's nice.  


If you accused him that he was more Batman than he was his public persona, in this world, he would brook no argument.  


He tells Dick to be kind to the… the gay ones, and the cross dressers, and the ones he can't  _ tell  _ what they may or may not be. They are dressing up in costumes and fighting for their own brand of justice, too, when they do so.  


Bruce has lived through part of their history without knowing he was of them. He can read death in all those histories, too. And violence. And it is hard to not see death and violence as the only thing the world ever brings.

...maybe if they survive long enough, it will be okay. Now that there's a vaccine, and medicine, and laws starting to go through.

Maybe it would go faster if Bruce Wayne came out, instead of just donating to charities that happened to help those kinds of people.  


But Bruce will not even talk without his voice changer. Will only write in print while Miss Wayne does everything in cursive. Tells himself that half of what makes Batman so hard to track down is that no one looks for the right type of man.

So it is  _ logic  _ that tells Bruce he will never come out, not anything silly like emotions and fear.  


After all, why would Batman, of all people, be driven by emotion and fear?

The kids talk about  _ pain _ in articles he reads, kids trying to explain themselves to a public who might with hope be receptive, or perhaps, they hope if they achieve pity, it might help them attain what they need to feel better-- whether that's hormones, surgery, or just a new wardrobe and the decency to be called what they asked to be called.  


...but their existence is not defined by suffering, other articles say, and Bruce would like to argue that, but he means  _ they  _ as in the collective population of earth, and the article writers mean  _ they  _ as a small percentage of that population trying to be listened to seriously.  


Existence has always been suffering since he was ten, and it all rather went downhill from there, honestly, but that's-- that's him, being dramatic, as Alfred would say, and he's not wrong.  


Bruce isn’t in pain, it's just…

If anything it's a pain in the ass he wishes he didn't have to go through, like most other things. Like-- like galas! Like getting dressed up for a gala to pretend to be a very cordial and refined young lady who likes long gowns and champagne, and who talks to people who think they know her but who are actually make assumptions based on what they've heard before and what she looks like.  


...yeah. It's exactly that type of bearable-but-exhausting pain in the ass he wishes he didn't have to go through.

Everyday of his life.  


With everyone he knows.  


Except when he's in the suit.  


\--

He asked Diana once, under the guise of professional curiosity, how it was men were kept out of Themyscira. She didn't quite understand the question at first, staring at him, head cocked.  


“For example,” he said, sitting across from her. “Does the barrier that hides the island also  _ repel  _ men? Would they simply be brushed off a boat heading into the barrier, or?”

He stops mostly because Diana has begun laughing. Not cruelly, because she is never explicitly cruel, but as if she has finally understood something.  


“No, no, men  _ have  _ been on the island,” she said, waving his question away with her hand. “But it is  _ prohibited by law _ . Our laws, not by magic. Think of it like the bathroom here. Just for women, or for men.”

Bruce nods understandingly.  


All Wayne Enterprises buildings built in the past five years have extensive neutral gender bathroom facilities available, and the older ones are in the process of converting.

\--

Batman has to weigh the benefits of not having his period compared to the detriment of birth control induced nausea. When it comes to standing on rooftops and dodging bullets, both feel like an injury-level handicap.  


Nothing fucking stops it.  


He takes his meds, but every fucking month, he has a day where it would just be so easy to let his car drift into oncoming traffic, and it's mostly the thought of Alfred's grief and the other drivers’ potential injuries that keeps him properly on track.  


He never has this problem at other times of the month.  


The donations never seem to go far enough. Even under his influence, Wayne Medical is still working on their new birth control techniques, and all he can think of is that they could make a one-in-a-billion miracle pill, and he would be the last person on earth it would work on.  


\--

Wonder Woman doesn't get a period.  


The ovary-bearing population of the league, all in unison, begin screaming.  


\--  


Talia still emails him sometimes.  


Just emails. Not burner accounts, just… separate, set-up emails, who see very little activity, except the casual chatter of middle aged fools.  


Talia calls him Beloved. Ra's calls him nothing at all.

Bruce isn't sure if Ra's even realizes the shadowy pain in his ass of Gotham is the same person as that young woman who endured his cult years ago. Talia doesn't need to pick sides between her father and a stranger. Sometimes they talk about the Batman, though, and about justice, and about a better world.  


Bruce never knows what to say. Talia says it's disappointing. He used to be full of opinions, back when they were in person together.  


\--

...Selina kissed him once, on a rooftop. They'd been flirting for months. She tried to pull his mask off.

He jerked away, because that had been  _ wrong _ , and he couldn't let Selina know what she'd really been kissing. If she'd feel assaulted or betrayed.

She stared at him a long moment after he jerked back. White mask to green eyes.  


She never really flirted with him again.

She doesn't dance with Miss Wayne at her galas.

...

\--

He drinks prairie oysters in the morning and downs real oysters at night. Supposedly egg yolk and shellfish are good to boost testosterone. It will never stop the feeling that when people look at his chest, suited up or out, they are looking at his breasts.

The thought that other people are  _ not  _ intimately aware of their private parts at all times is such a foreign concept that he honestly doesn’t understand why people question painting a blazing yellow target on his chest.

\--

At the start of summer, he donates to the foodbanks. The 26th of September, to the gun control funds and prison rehab. Juneteenth to antiracism advocacy groups. October 11th, to the homeless shelters.  


All he knows is at the end of the day, no matter what, there are always more homeless kids on the street than they started out with.  


\--

Despite all evidence, Alfred still says that one day, he’ll make someone a lovely wife.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> started writing this at skull's last year around christmas because of a lot of Aggression about Correct Names and Pronouns.
> 
> has a part 2 partly written up, but hypothetically this can stand on its own rn. 
> 
> ...hey. hey. you don't have to be nice to people. just listen when they tell you about themselves.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> baseball may have forgotten the suicidal ideation tag because they assume that is implied with Batman fics

Miss Wayne does not fall gracefully. 

Bruce doesn't either. But at least the Justice League bears more sympathy towards him than the media does a drunken, crying woman in the middle of the dance floor. 

(A _ spectacle. _ His whole life he's been nothing but putting on acts for people. Stoic and calm and full of dignity and grace and ** _angry_ ** _ . _)

The Justice League only has so much sympathy, still. But he wonders what it would be like if Black Canary took on a sidekick, or Diana, or Hawkgirl. He wonders if Clark would’ve swooped in to stop Diana from killing the man who killed her child, or if he would’ve said something about a mother’s grief. 

\--

Robin believed in magic. Robin looked at him like a kind of witch when the mask first came off. 

Robin only called him _ him _in the field, and never in the cave or manor. Robin laughed himself silly when he realized not even Superman had figured it out. 

Robin was kind to women. Unquestioningly kind to them. 

Batman didn’t realize how large a hole Robin's mothers left inside him until it was too late.

\--

For Bruce, death was a lot like alcohol: you start with the first shot, and then you just keep going. 

Maybe Clark knew that. Maybe Bruce resents him for it. Because nobody knows him at all. These aren’t the sort of things people are supposed to be able to _ guess. _

...so Miss Wayne gets calls to go to rehab. To straighten herself out. She becomes a hermit. Photos from her old modeling days appear, back to back comparisons with new tabloid candids of her red-eyed and hair in disarray as she’s hauled by her arm away from her own parties. Years of being prim and straight-laced, smashed apart in an instant.

When the future stops existing, it’s hard to care about best laid plans.

Batman can rampage as much as he wants without needing the makeup to cover up the bruises in the morning. 

\--

There’s only one thing to know about the crying game: even when it means dying, a scorpion cannot change their nature. 

\-- 

Selina catches him on a rooftop, fists bloody, and he wants to pull his helmet off and kiss her and fall into something that feels nice and could wipe the world out for a moment. She tells him this is how villains are made.

\--

It was strange. 

He didn’t feel like a person who cared what other people thought about him. 

Except for this.

—

He doesn’t ask for the kids to show up. He wishes they never had. But no one seems to take ‘no’ as an answer from him. Not even as Batman anymore.

…

\--

Robin is a quiet kid. His parents are alive, but traveling, always traveling. 

He plays video games. He likes photography. 

He knocks on the door in the late afternoon one day, and mumbles a hello to Alfred, hiding his eyes in overgrown bangs, and says he needs to talk to Miss Wayne. He has some photos to show her. When Alfred tells him no, Robin asks if she’s already gone out as Batman for the night.

(Robin is waiting for him in the foyer when Bruce returns, stumbling up the stairs with a clot of blood dangling out of his broken nose and a his knuckles scraped raw even through the gloves. There’s still blood in his mouth when he demands to know what’s going on.)

(Robin thinks it was really clever, how he hid for so long. How he wasn’t entirely sure for a few years, even after discovering who the first Robin was. But it’s the word _ clever _ that sticks out in his head. _ Clever girl, _and even when it comes from a child, it still curls up in his chest, and he doesn’t want to listen anymore. All he wants to do but find something hard to hit.)

(Robin gets kicked out. Robin brings Nightwing back to him. Robin’s a good kid. He doesn’t deserve the budding resentment growing in Bruce’s chest. Robin doesn’t leave.)

(Bruce wonders, not for the first time, if the knot in his chest will ever leave, either.)

\--

...He cannot talk with Robin like he used to. He can’t talk about protecting people different from them, or or about flying, or magic, or the hole their mothers left in their hearts. He can’t go through that, again. 

Robin learns to decipher the silences, instead.

\--

Robin flings herself onto the streets to escape her father, and Bruce can never keep himself steady enough anymore.

He can’t talk with her. Can’t train her. Every mistake is going to be a deadly one. Every time she laughs he stews in envy. He keeps himself so impartial he’s _ detached _, and--

He’s never hated someone for being authentically _ themselves _ before. Diana was nothing but Herself. Clark was two faced but always sincere even behind his masks. J’onn was a fucking _ shapeshifter mindreader _who was so goddamn transparent that he asks permission to ask what’s upsetting about a situation. 

Bruce doesn’t know how to answer him anymore. All he knows is every time Robin laughs, she is alive, and vibrant, and she has never needed to grow into this role: it sprung fully formed out of her, as if she were born to shape it. And he cannot take out his anger. She is a _ child _ and she has done _ nothing _wrong, but maybe if he avoids her enough he can keep things calm until they go away. 

The only confrontation he’s been able to do in his life is with his fists. 

Robin is curious, and brave, and eager. Robin asks about the time Miss Wayne spent as a plus-sized model. Robin asks about makeup to cover up wounds. Robin asks if maybe she should _ also _pretend to be another gender in costume, to throw people off her trail.

\--

Robin dies gurgling, clinging to his hand. Bruce tells her she was perfect. He should have said he was sorry.

He sees her body in his nightmares. 

He doesn’t stop seeing her body in his nightmares. 

Maybe their existence is just suffering. Maybe the world he wants will never exist, and he’s envious of people who make it themselves. Maybe he’s a pitiful excuse for a piece of shit, and he should’ve let some street mugger gun himself down when he was fifteen, wandering out into the night and waiting for something terrible to happen. The police had stalked him around town, hauling him into their cars and back up to Wayne Manor, up in the dark hills with the crickets and the wind blowing through the empty trees, and maybe it would’ve been easier on everyone if they’d just stayed corrupt cops and dumped his body in the river like they always should’ve done. 

\--

Their lives aren’t defined by suffering. _ Everyone’s _lives are. 

\--

Sometimes he wonders how Superman never hears him screaming.

\--

He supposes Superman doesn’t know who to look for. 

\--

\--

\--

\--

Talia gives him a present. 

This is a bad way to refer to a human being, but it is indeed the phrasing the email used.

Talia gives him a present, which is clearly a time bomb in the making. She writes _ I know you always had a soft spot for children, and coincidentally, I did happen to have some of your eggs in a freezer. _

(Bruce does not want to know which League of Assassins member thought to order some poor ninja to go through his trash and steal any sanitary products that may have potentially contained eggs.)

He might’ve been unsettled if he weren’t so fucking _ tired _. So he just slumps, resigned in his chair, reading further down the otherwise innocuous email, detailing how Talia had dabbled some in genetic engineering, and how her father had taken interest. 

Ra’s had done a bit of editing. Hardwiring to his preference. He’d always said Talia would’ve been perfect if she’d been a boy, after all. 

(Bruce wonders, if the child had remained a girl, if Ra’s would have even noticed a granddaughter. If Talia could’ve kept her, and doted on her: another little princess in a tower of thorns.)

Talia will know soon, then. About who Bruce really is. About Batman. There’s no way an assassin-trained child soldier won’t report to their commanding officer, even after being sent away for their own sake. There won’t be any disconnect for Ra’s anymore. No reason for Ra’s to respect anything of Batman’s strength. Because as soon as they find the door of the cave, it will all be over, and all his excuses will mean nothing. 

Why keep pretending to be Bat_ man _when all the world knows? 

He can try to hide and put it off. But there will be a child ninja-assassin in the house, day in and day out. 

One day, something will go wrong. 

\--

Day one, everything goes wrong.

The boy looks just like Talia, and just like Bruce, and he storms through the house like a little peacock, beak in the air and inspecting all his wares. He doesn’t address Alfred by name, or acknowledge his presence at all, which is _ traditionally _ formal, but in this house, it is _ rude. _And when Bruce tells him so, he realizes that Ra’s overcontrolling has also left a very certain impression of women on him, too. And unless he is Lady Shiva, the boy does not know how to respect even someone his mother apparently spoke highly of. 

Strength aside, apparently a woman who is not literally the best assassin in the world is just… still a step down from anyone else. 

It sets a fire inside Bruce’s blood that he hasn’t felt so strongly in a very long time. It is not a good fire. It is hate.

\--

It is _ hard _ to nurture someone you hate. It is hard to try and calmly explain why casual harm from indifference or spite is _ painful _to someone who doesn’t believe the injury exists, much less someone raised by literal assassins and who takes being ‘harmed’ to be a very literal experience. 

It is very hard to not see someone so unaffected and want to _ beat them until they fear. _

...but that is _ bad _. And he is a child. And he is a nightmare. And one thing does not invalidate the other. 

Bruce is going to end up in tears from frustration and no one will ever be able to let him forget it. Because he is ‘_ fragile _ ,’ and ‘ _ emotional _,’ and every time the boy calls him mother, he wakes up midday and curls around a bottle on the staircase, eyes as hot as heatvision.

There is no honest way out. He can’t throw this kid back to the wolves. He can’t throw this wolf into an ignorant Gotham. He _ can’t let them know. _ If he doesn’t do _ something _ this holding pattern will shatter under him and he will do _ something, _like Alfred always says he’s going to do, blowing up and taking everyone with him one day. 

But there’s _ no honest way out. _

He’s used to risky escapes and stupid plans. But that’s a nighttime thing. That’s there and then it’s _ over. _ For better or worse, it’s been _ done. _

But now dawn keeps coming, and this is still happening. The children keep coming. Invading his life, and he doesn’t have anything left to give them.

—

They’ve tried to restrain his violent tendencies, but the boy still practices kata in all kinds of unlikely places to be obstinate, and he’s finally kata’d his way into the wrong statue, and opened a hole in the wall. 

He is hissing and spitting with accusations when the car rolls back into the cave, but the only one Bruce hears is, _ are you having an _ ** _affair _ ** _ with my **mother**?_

And Bruce cannot do this anymore. 

He takes off the helmet and throws it at the boy, and can only feel miserable that he missed yet the child _ still _ has this wide-eyed, stunned look on his face as if he’s been struck. As if _ he’s _been struck.

The boy turns and walks stoically out of the cave. 

...

Bruce gets back in the car. He sits back with his hands on the steering wheel, and waits, patiently, to die.


	3. Chapter 3

For about a week, there is silence. Bruce knows it doesn’t mean that things aren’t going on. He can’t seem to enjoy it all the same, still waiting quietly for the worse outcome to finally appear.

Alfred has run some quiet interference. Or, not so quiet, perhaps, as the boy ran straight to him upon his discovery, and was apparently quite put out that Alfred did not seem to find this revelation revelatory.

It seemed the grandson of the demon head was not used to being the last to know things.

It seemed pride was a good enough barrier to stop him from revealing it.

—

When he is spoken to again, it is by an angry, red-faced child, demanding to know why he hasn’t been asked to follow in his parent’s legacy.

His mother speaks highly of the Batman.

—

Robin calls him ‘she’ at all times.

Robin doesn’t know how to take ‘no’ for an answer.

Robin balks at his correspondences being monitored, because despite being raised by ninja, Robin is extremely bad at the concept of secrecy.

More importantly, Robin has a few moments more of uncertainty each time Bruce tells him he is _ wrong. _ Perhaps because Robin has indeed, been _ completely wrong _ , for the first time in his life. And now the one he looked down on is knocking him on his back on the training mat daily, and Bruce cannot feel bad about the hissing tantrums as Robin storms back upstairs at the end of the night.

After several months, it’s been long enough things almost feel tame. Bruce has slid through on a thin lubricate of frustration and picking at his fingertips. But survival is survival. And once the lesson of _ do not underestimate based on body _has sunk in, Robin keeps a warier eye on Alfred as well, and along with that comes more subdued insults, rather that blatant disobedience.

...they keep a schedule for the kid. Training with Batman, cooking with Alfred. Once he seems like he won’t destroy them, they call in private tutors to get his severely lacking education up to snuff. Yes, he can do calculus and speak five languages, but his world history, non-biological science, and reading comprehension leave… things to be desired.

They just had to… wait until he was more willing to learn than to scream.

…

The house seems almost quiet now. The nights never are. The nights Bruce can’t be what he wants to be, because now he has run out of excuses. Now he has to watch out for someone even more violent for even worse reasons— but sometimes, the days seem peaceful, even as Robin sneaks about the house, as if he’s not just gotten oil paint all over the rug in his room and is about to soak it in turpentine and set it on fire.

—

Bruce has a crying child in his arms. No older than seven. They cling to the symbol on his chest and ignore his bloody hands, and the glaring boy in the edge of the ally, watching them warily—but when Bruce glances over, Robin’s head snaps back away, and pretends he cares about taking watch.

Bruce remembers being Robin’s age in school. His classmates (his _ female _ classmates, whose group he was somehow an extension of) complained about the placement of names on their gym shirts. That why culdn’t it be further up, or on their back, or somewhere _ other _ than the direct center of their chests? He hadn’t understood. He hadn’t known any difference, and now having an excuse for being looked at or clung to is a shield on him just as much as Superman’s is. So he doesn’t have to think about those things at times like right now, where small hands are grabbing, and he _ knows _ they’re hoping for purchase and comfort, but on the bad days, it would distract him all the same.

They’ll have to do something with the kid before sunrise, but for now, Bruce will have to put the patrol on hold, and mumble comforting words until the child can breathe again.

—

Back in the manor, Robin asks him what’s the _ point _of abuse. Bruce can’t give him an answer that would justify it.

Robin tisks and seems disappointed, somehow. Bruce doesn’t have any energy to care.

—

Robin likes animals, thank god, because otherwise they’d have to simply assume he didn’t like anything but fine arts and violence. Bruce has no idea why Talia thinks he and Bruce are similar, but she apparently does—asking after her precious boy every other day through the emails. Most of them go unreturned.

But he can send back one report, finally, that Robin has found his injured namesake in the yard and brought it into the manor to be looked over. Just a fledgling, if that. Alfred takes him to the wildlife center, and deposits it with the staff there, and they take a tour through the building to look at the displayed animals there. He comes home and uses his budding knowledge of the internet to read aloud (and very proudly) every animal fact he can find on interesting facts lists off of google.

Pigeons can distinguish between painter styles.

Penguins mate for life.

All clownfish and ribbon eels are born male. Later in life, some change sex for mating, and some frogs can change at will.

—

...Bruce can’t tell Robin to be kind. But he asks the child not to bear _ those ones _ anymore contempt than other humans. To not hate them for dressing up in odd clothes and parading around. He is so tired. Now that the danger is mostly passed, he barely has energy to scold anymore when Robin says ‘she’ in costume. At least the burning hate is gone. He doesn’t know if he has anything left in him to hate. So he just… asks Robin to treat them the same. Protect them just the same as the others, even if Robin is only doing so to stretch his legs. Solve the murders just the same. Arrest them just the same, too, if they have to.

Robin gives him a long side ways look from his perch on the ledge, and Bruce is too tired to try and read it. He just stares out into the street, eyes seeing nothing. All that’s in him is air. He could deflate at any moment.

Robin finally nods, and Bruce doesn’t remember much of the rest of that night.

—

Jim Gordon beings him a cup of coffee on the top of the precinct one night, upon realizing Bruce is out on his own. It’s a slow night, Bruce thinks. Crime drops with the weather and rises with the heat. At least, it does in Gotham, where the height of summer is barely eighty, but the winter wind chill brings them into an icy negative fifteen some years.

He remembers the heat of the coffee, and how the steam rose up and fogged the acrylic covering his eyes.

Jim said something about how it was nice to not see so many broken apart faces lately, but that something still seemed to be off.

Bruce considered that, and offered some theories about shifting crime locations with the clearing of Bludhaven up north. Jim did not seem to be interested in talking about it.

\--

Sometimes, Bruce remembers that while he doesn’t care what people think of him, sometimes, he still wishes someone would tell him what it is he’s doing wrong.

\--

Miss Wayne hosts another gala to introduce Robin to the public. It goes perfectly. Just like rehearsed. Robin is distant but polite, like the one before him, the one who’s still alive-- distant but polite, and he takes a nice picture for the press, and Miss Wayne escorts him inside for his bedtime, which will be spent in his room practicing violin until it’s time to go out for patrol.

But that is several hours away. And Miss Wayne is quiet and reserved, and thanks everyone with a gentle smile when they congratulate her on her latest adoption, because certainly, the child cannot be hers. Not with that alcohol, and that figure, and how the paparazzi would never let her vanish a full nine months to hide a pregnancy.

Bruce lives through every moment of it, but it all feels like distant buzzing on the surface of his skin.

He wants another martini.

\--

Bruce drinks four martinis. Legally, he’s above the blood alcohol driving limit. Technically, he doesn’t need to _ drive _ the car given it has an autopilot system.

Alfred lectures him until Bruce wonders if perhaps he’s miscounted. He vomits on the batcave floor, and Alfred tuts in surprise, and holds Bruce’s hair out of his face.

He says something like, _ young lady, you are going to be the death of me, I swear. _

It all just buzzes away on his skin.

\--

Robin asks him something about his mother. His grandfather.

Bruce is too drunk to lie to him.

He doesn’t remember what he says. Robin doesn’t speak to him for another week. Alfred is scolding him again about taking the child’s feelings into account.

Bruce wonders what he would’ve become, if anyone ever told him something straight about his parents. If anyone just told him they made mistakes sometimes. If he would have felt like this every day. The need to at least put up the appearance of climbing out of the pit, when they all knew damn well that he’d dug this ditch and he was going to lie down and die in it.

The other robins don’t speak to him anymore, either. They haven’t in a long time.

He hopes they know that they’re the lucky ones.

They escaped. He never meant to drag anyone so far down with him.

He guesses Robin is just the ultimate conclusion of all those mistakes. Born from him. Now stuck here to die with him.

\--

Robin comes to him with a question.

There’s no one else to go to, Bruce supposes.

He’s chased everyone else so far away. Not even the Justice League call anymore. Not that he remembers, lately. He wonders what he told them to keep them away.

\--

Robin comes to him with a question. It’s about biology, for once, which Bruce remembers, because typically that’s a subject the kid likes to say he knows everything about: he’s been torn apart enough, apparently, to know everything about innards.

It does seem like it’s been a long time since he said things like that, though. But everything feels like it’s been a long time, lately.

Robin asks him about biology. About how, hypothetically, would tampering with the X chromosomes before fertilization to manually create two sets of Y chromosomes do anything to the resultant zygote.

Bruce remembers thinking, _ probably fuck it up good, _ and that of all the possibilities, manually destroying something that tiny and ridiculous was probably going to just kill the zygote’s chances of properly forming in general, and he is pretty sure he said as much. He’s pretty sure he did.

It’s the next morning with a pounding headache and a sullen boy sitting out on the garden steps, refilling his birdfeeder, that Bruce realizes he may have made another mistake.

...for the first time in a long while, he even feels the pain of it.

\--

...Bruce is not addicted to pain. Especially not emotional pain.

In fact, he has a very low tolerance of it.

…

He just also has no way to act on it. He barely remembers half of what he’s said to Robin the last few times they talked. He’s lucid enough to know he has to do _ something _but anxious and stupid enough he finds the alcohol before even eating anything and ends up telling Alfred they need to have the sex talk.

The kid throws a shoe at Bruce a few hours later over what he’s pretty sure is dinner.

He probably deserves it.

\--

Why is he most aware of his private parts when he thinks of other people.

Why can’t Robin just ask him that question again, and maybe they can have a do-over, and Bruce will say it all right this time.

\--

Sometimes he imagines self mutilation and it helps steel him some when he finally gets to Robin’s door, numb enough to not feel much outside his heartbeat but sober enough he should have some control over what he’s saying.

...and yet still not trusting himself enough that he has a recorder in his pocket, so that, just in case, he’ll remember what was said.

This is important again. It’s important enough that he needs to remember it. The worst part is, thinking that thought outside the doorway is the clearest part of the memory. He does use the recorder to remember the words later. To play back a few long minutes, and blink more tiredness out of his eyes, and feel awake as he hadn’t felt in a very long time.

\--

Robin thinks that, perhaps, the cloning process was imperfect. He may, perhaps, be defective.

He is not sure, exactly, what ‘_ he’ _is.

...and he does not cry, but his voice, young and not yet broken, shakes on the recording.

_ Grandfather must never know _ , he’d said. _ But you’ve clearly kept secrets from him before. _

\--

Bruce remembers, like some foggy morning from over the lake, long ago. He remembers, when Batman wasn’t yet a shield, and he thought so sharp that it cut the insides of his eyes to feel things.

He thought _ I will never let something like this happen to anyone else again.  
_

_ If it does, I will be there to help.  
_

...he doesn’t know how to do that now.

His breathing shakes, and he pulls on his hair net, and his mask, and goes to sit at the computer chair in the cave.

The only thing he’s ever been good at is misery, and planning. Maybe, he can make this one better. Maybe, it won’t end up like Jason, or like Stephanie.

...so step one. He must do research. He must gather as much knowledge as he can. The first thing that comes up are the statistics. He has always had a good head for those, and as much as he’s feeling for the first time forever, he’s still at least numb enough to read these and memorize and dissect without distraction.

...if things don’t change, then the mistakes of the past were doomed to be repeated. This meant first off, that the mistakes of the past had to be known and studied, to look for ways to possibly subvert them ahead of time.

Alerting Alfred, who controlled the entire household, would be the most efficient way to change the environment to avoid repetition. To let the heroes that Robin would go to in case of emergencies know would also provide effective safe harbor and flexibility in a situation. Foreknowledge of issues was vital in unexpected situations. And--

And yet, with the conversation literally in the palm of his hand, he knew that… the security of this information was somehow more vital. It had been given to him in… the confidence of his ability to keep a secret.

Multiple times now. Bruce had kept from Robin so many secrets.

...it would be hard to come up with a suitable excuse for why to bring such a thing up, when there was only one recent change in his life which it could be coming from.

…

There was one other option. To bring it up. To start to enact a space which would care more. Notice more. One which would still keep a secret, without broadcasting that a secret was still actively being kept.

…

He would have to do _ something _ . It was the same, aching pain in his chest that had driven him from the manor all those years ago, long before he knew that Batman was more than just a clever ruse to cover his identity. The need to do _ something _ to fix things. To do better. Once a problem was in front of his face and _ he could do something _, it was so hard to not try.

He had to make a decision. Deciding to not act was still a decision. Sometimes it was a good one.

Sometimes Bruce didn’t _ fucking care _ if it was a good one. Sometimes he was an idiot, and he ran off to join a cult of assassins, left his fucking egg cells somewhere in a compound because he didn’t know he should burn every rag he touched apparently, and then after more than twenty years literally punching crime in the face, breaking his back and most other bones in his body at least once, and either escalating a situation beyond repair or making a miserable city breathe again, he had a goddamn son who had no choice in who his family was, and he had to do _ something _ .

And right now, Bruce still couldn’t feel his emotions so well. It’d been over a week since they last patrolled. He’d been drinking and his health had failed more, and days had gone by in a blur as Alfred refused to let him out of the house unless he thought maybe Bruce would come back alive. And he couldn’t lose Robin again.

He couldn’t be cruel to Robin again. Not after Stephanie.

He’d been trying to stay far away, like with Tim. They’d both had places they should’ve returned to. They both kept trying to _ stay. _

But there was nowhere for Damian to return to. Nowhere that would be safe. Nowhere that would raise him into a world where he could change his birdfeeder, and not need to lift a sword, and ask questions about things that Ra’s decided where unimportant to know about the lower world.

And there was at least one excuse to use to bring this issue up to light. Before Damian hit puberty. Before he even had to think about it again. Or go to school. And be in the gym. And wonder why the name had to be across the center of the shirt.

…

Maybe he could work it up private with Clark, or Diana. Maybe with their influence they could quietly work the rest of the League over time to be a place where, worst came to worst, Damian would be able to hide.

...but step one was a lot closer by, and Bruce thought that maybe, he was still numb, and he had always been good at plunging headforth into bad, impassioned decisions.

Still cold in his fingers and toes, Bruce got up from the chair, and tugged off the mask, but still held it tightly in his hands.

And he turned to the exit, and walked up the stairs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it's batman day.
> 
> if it looks like whatever you're doing is leading to a dead end, the only option is to accept it, or make a change.
> 
> this isn't a story encouraging people to come out. fucking dont if you don't want to or feel unsafe. also it's none of anyone's business so you arent' obligated at all to do it 'for them.' but there are a lot of reasons to come out and none of them are wrong. we all just want to live our lives.
> 
> and honestly.... we all need some upbeat music in our lives. https://youtu.be/1f1ZashF_Ms


End file.
